しあわせ

Kanji Sieve for Mac v0.3 is ready. Unfortunately due to pressing matters elsewhere this is about as far as I can go for now.
Unavoidably that means it could be a few months before a Windows version appears.
Rather than sit on the Mac version which is functional, now that I have permissions for the Chuta dictionary and Flashcard Deluxe features I decided to upload it.
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Now with added Kanji Sieve. Or rather the way Kanji Sieve has evolved means I’ll be incorporating my Kanji NoteBook project with it.
Unfortunately I think the direction I’m heading in means an awful lot of work on the interface. And a lot of time I don’t have to spare at the moment, but I am working on it and am excited about the way it’s progressing.
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I was a little underwhelmed by Apple’s two recent offerings. The Touch didn’t get a camera and the price drop has yet to convince me to buy one. Maybe in the New Year.

Then there was Snow Leopard. Anything new and exciting here? Anything new for Japanese learners?

Not really. There’s a few new fonts (nothing too exciting) and there’s a port of the input method for Chinese from the Touch. That was enough to get me to buy a copy. It was cheap at any rate.

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Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.
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NoteBook 2.1 from Circus Ponies Software

I use my MacBook a lot to learn Japanese. I’ve got so many clippings from websites, stray urls, little notes I’ve written scattered all over my harddrive. I’ve also got loads of barely organised pieces of paper with notes. The solution? NoteBook!

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Skim 0.7

I came across this useful little program for the Mac today. It’s a pdf reader that allows you to add notes and marks to a pdf file.

I carry my laptop much more often than I carry my class notes. So what I do is scan in the handouts I get in class and annotate them so I have a ready reference without carrying large amounts of paper around. (It might be possible to OCR the handouts but I’ve never needed this step.) It’s also possible to make them searchable if you annotate them properly.

The drawbacks (or maybe it’s just a feature) are that the notes and marks are not part of the pdf so other readers won’t be able to display them. So if you want to share a marked up document the other person will need to use Skim as well. I’ve found that notes added in another program won’t open and as yet I’ve had no success with the line/arrow tool.

What I particulary like about this program is it’s layout of panes and the ability to set what font and size you want the notes in. I always found the fixed size in other programs too small to read kanji notes. Best of all it’s free